Annie Get Your Gun
(1950)
(1950)
Director: George Sidney, Busby Berkeley (uncredited)
Writers: Sidney Sheldon (screenplay), Herbert Fields (book), Dorothy Fields (book)
Cast: Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern, J. Carrol Naish, Edward Arnold, Keenan Wynn
Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042200/
Annie Get Your Gun is regarded as one of the most famous MGM musicals in the Western genre. Originally based on the book written by Dorothy Fields and her brother Herbert Fields, the story is based on the life of Annie Oakley who was an American sharpshooter with a leading role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The story also revolves around the romance between Annie and Frank Butler, also a sharpshooter who competes with Annie. Trouble however is on the horizon when Annie is in competition with Frank, who she falls in love with, yet he rejects her expertise as a shooter and their romance soon dissipates. When Annie meets Sitting Bull for advice, he suggests she loses the competition against Frank, since she "can't get a man with a gun".
Before the film was made, Annie Get Your Gun was a successful musical on Broadway with 1,147 performances which continued worldwide even after the film adaptation. The nature of the story combines the traditional elements of a Western, with a romantic journey, fictionalizing the life of the real Annie Oakley, a professional sharpshooter with qualities and characteristics like a tomboy who was very skilled at shooting. It is interesting to note that the representation of a lead starring female who posesses a gun and is indeed very skillful with the weaponry, is actually a female, due to the attached connotations that women do not identify with the stereotype of posessing a gun and being talented with it, let alone being the main star of a Western. In Oakley's real life, she promoted women to serve in the war, however, President Roosevelt rejected Oakley's idea of women using sharpshooters. Furthermore, Oakley believed that women should learn and know how to use a gun, purely for saftey and also the licence it gave women to feel empowered.
Kathryn Kalinak commented in her book Music in the Western: Notes From the Frontier "For a motion picture industry struggling to secure its foot in a new legal and economic landscape, the strange brew mixing women, song, and westerns was not in actuality so strange." This suggests how the rising popularity of A films such as Annie Get Your Gun was seeing the downfall of popular western B films since "cowgirls [at this time] thrived in American popular culture." Also, the Western genre was becoming popular in television and the record industry therefore why this film became so successful. "Even as the compass and conventions of the western changed, the cowgirl remained a one-off during the 1950s, treated in the industry and in the cultural imagination as an offbeat diversion."
The film is categorised as a Western, due to the plot surrounding Annie's profession with guns, and entering Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Therefore, there are characteristics and clear symbols that represent the genre, including how Chief Sitting Bull adopts Annie into the Sioux tribe after her performance in the show. Bosley Crowther comments in a New York Times review (1950) stating: "the shots of a Wild West show in action are the tokens of that supreme regard." The tokens can be referred to as the token symbols that traditionally a Western emanates such as: the open landscape, the use of guns, the western style that is portrayed through the clothes, and the presence of an American Indian. What is significant to note is Crowther's review that was written just a short time after the film was premiered, yet he states, "Betty Hutton is not Ethel Merman... and the screen sometimes fails to throb and tingle with the spontaneity that emerges froma stage." Yet Crowther explains that "when a movie producer elaborately sets out to prove that anything you can do he can do better, you can confidently expect a lot of show. That's why the M.-G.-M. version of "Annie Get Your Gun" is a whale of a musical picture."
Source: Kathryn Kalinak, Music in the Western: Notes From the Frontier (New York: Routledge, 2012) p. 103.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F07E3DB1539E13BBC4052DFB366838B649EDE&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes
Writers: Sidney Sheldon (screenplay), Herbert Fields (book), Dorothy Fields (book)
Cast: Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern, J. Carrol Naish, Edward Arnold, Keenan Wynn
Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042200/
Annie Get Your Gun is regarded as one of the most famous MGM musicals in the Western genre. Originally based on the book written by Dorothy Fields and her brother Herbert Fields, the story is based on the life of Annie Oakley who was an American sharpshooter with a leading role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The story also revolves around the romance between Annie and Frank Butler, also a sharpshooter who competes with Annie. Trouble however is on the horizon when Annie is in competition with Frank, who she falls in love with, yet he rejects her expertise as a shooter and their romance soon dissipates. When Annie meets Sitting Bull for advice, he suggests she loses the competition against Frank, since she "can't get a man with a gun".
Before the film was made, Annie Get Your Gun was a successful musical on Broadway with 1,147 performances which continued worldwide even after the film adaptation. The nature of the story combines the traditional elements of a Western, with a romantic journey, fictionalizing the life of the real Annie Oakley, a professional sharpshooter with qualities and characteristics like a tomboy who was very skilled at shooting. It is interesting to note that the representation of a lead starring female who posesses a gun and is indeed very skillful with the weaponry, is actually a female, due to the attached connotations that women do not identify with the stereotype of posessing a gun and being talented with it, let alone being the main star of a Western. In Oakley's real life, she promoted women to serve in the war, however, President Roosevelt rejected Oakley's idea of women using sharpshooters. Furthermore, Oakley believed that women should learn and know how to use a gun, purely for saftey and also the licence it gave women to feel empowered.
Kathryn Kalinak commented in her book Music in the Western: Notes From the Frontier "For a motion picture industry struggling to secure its foot in a new legal and economic landscape, the strange brew mixing women, song, and westerns was not in actuality so strange." This suggests how the rising popularity of A films such as Annie Get Your Gun was seeing the downfall of popular western B films since "cowgirls [at this time] thrived in American popular culture." Also, the Western genre was becoming popular in television and the record industry therefore why this film became so successful. "Even as the compass and conventions of the western changed, the cowgirl remained a one-off during the 1950s, treated in the industry and in the cultural imagination as an offbeat diversion."
The film is categorised as a Western, due to the plot surrounding Annie's profession with guns, and entering Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Therefore, there are characteristics and clear symbols that represent the genre, including how Chief Sitting Bull adopts Annie into the Sioux tribe after her performance in the show. Bosley Crowther comments in a New York Times review (1950) stating: "the shots of a Wild West show in action are the tokens of that supreme regard." The tokens can be referred to as the token symbols that traditionally a Western emanates such as: the open landscape, the use of guns, the western style that is portrayed through the clothes, and the presence of an American Indian. What is significant to note is Crowther's review that was written just a short time after the film was premiered, yet he states, "Betty Hutton is not Ethel Merman... and the screen sometimes fails to throb and tingle with the spontaneity that emerges froma stage." Yet Crowther explains that "when a movie producer elaborately sets out to prove that anything you can do he can do better, you can confidently expect a lot of show. That's why the M.-G.-M. version of "Annie Get Your Gun" is a whale of a musical picture."
Source: Kathryn Kalinak, Music in the Western: Notes From the Frontier (New York: Routledge, 2012) p. 103.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F07E3DB1539E13BBC4052DFB366838B649EDE&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes
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